Hello all. My Ubuntu 11.10 installation seems to suddenly lock up. I cannot move my mouse or use the keyboard, all screen activity stops, and I have to do a hard reboot. Is there an y method to repair this? It started a few days ago.

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@JorgeCastro In my opinion, this is not a bug, but a valid question(I assume you thought of a memory leak), but this is a user trying to get help with freezing(containing instructions that other users may use to diagnose constant hangs) and possibly adding badram addresses to the grub config to avoid bad areas.
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hexafractionJun 12 '12 at 20:22

1 Answer
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Before you panic, try the magic SysRq trick. Find the key on your keyboard labelled PRT SCRN|SYSRQ(Could be arranged differently). Hold that key, ALT and M. This invokes the Linux oom_kill which could aid in recovering. Also, try this with B instead of M and see it it reboots then. If it does, then you are either out of memory(If you have a swap partition, your disk may be active), or you have another software issue. If not, it is hardware. Try pressing CTRL+ALT+F1 during the freeze. Does that work? If so, you can use top after logging in to ascertain the process causing the issue.

Try running vmstat 1 in the Teminal. In a comment, tell us your swapin and swapout values.

Also ,try running top, giving us the top %CPU values, then pressing SHIFT+O, then Q or T, then ENTER. and the RSS and SHR values of the top processes. This can help pinpoint the cause. Also, are you using Skype, by any chance? There is a reported memory leak in it.

did I provide you with all information you need?
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AlenJun 11 '12 at 21:44

Were you holding ALT when tried to use the key combo? Or do you have a separate SysRQ key? Also, is the info about memory from after the lockup or before(using the terminal given with ctrl +alt+F1)? Were you able to switch to a terminal using that key combo?
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hexafractionJun 11 '12 at 22:16